RANT: No, the Giffords shooting is NOT an excuse to change gun laws and revoke freedom

Jared never even saw a shrink. So if you are suggesting that college applications administrators can revoke our 2nd amendment rights, you’re crazy. Or maybe you’re suggesting that police should be able to force us into mental counseling [where they then take away constitutional rights].

Thing is, society already has laws against murder; in fact we execute more murderers than almost every other country in the world. So what did you want to happen here? The cops force you to see a shrink who takes away your constitutional rights? We already have that: It’s called committing someone to an asylum.

So you must be suggesting that if someone is “kinda” dangerous, but not dangerous enough to commit to an asylum, that we take away their constitutional right based on some kind of fuzzy logic of what we think they might do in the future?

Reminds me of the registered sex offenders. “We don’t want to keep you in jail. We’ll just let you be free, but with less rights, in order to make it harder for you to re-commit a crime.” Except then the list get abused, now we have people who committed non sex crimes on it, molesters living under bridges and homeless because they can’t live anywhere [and thus driven underground and less trackable], and so many people on the list that it’s more or less useless [my house is surrounded by dots, apparently no child is safe outside anywhere].

I’m not a big fan of a caste system. Everyone free should have equal rights. There are already a ton of things done in our society to prevent something like this. But the simple fact is, you can’t just stop bad things from happening, any more than speeding laws stop all car accidents.

Insanity is sometimes defined as repeating the same thing over and over again expecting different results. How about every time someone gets shot, we add more gun control? I’m sure the millionth time, all murder will magically stop!

The simple fact of the matter is, prohibitions of physical objects DO NOT WORK. You know what else we consider a pre-existing condition to crime? Drugs. We have spent more money than any society in existence to fight drugs, and they are still in every *prison*, let alone in peoples’ houses. We failed at alcohol prohibition too. (Gun control works a little better on Islands like UK or Japan, but people can still get them. Certainly if they are planning to kill someone for MONTHS, like the Giffords shooter.)

I guess you are suggesting forced psychological counseling for those who disrupt their high school classes. Hell, I can be fine with that if it’s part of a plea deal. But I’m not fine with people not convicted of a crime having their constitutional rights summarily dismissed without due process before they’ve actually been convicted of anything.

This shooting is being used by liberals as an appeal to authoritariansm! It’s disgusting! The conservatives are supposed to be the authoritarians! Please stop reminding me that both the left AND the right want to take away my freedom, because that leaves very few allies in this world.

The whole idea of taking rights away from people who are deemed too dangerous to have them — but not dangerous enough to incarcerate — is basically the same concept as the sex offender list: A group of people who are allowed to be free, but somehow get less rights.

And that’s a great example of how government erosion of rights works. The slippery slope argument, usually a fallacy in most situations, is almost always valid with civil liberties.

Now we have sex offender lists with burglars on them; people who are married to a wife 3 years younger than them, with children, but unable to provide for those children because the wife was 15 when they were 18 [just like my wife, 2 yrs and 1 month younger than me] and her parents called the cops and now they are a sex offender. Anyone following the story of sex offenders, with people literally being forced to live under a bridge, has to question how someone can be treated worse than a paroled murderer.

At least in that case, it’s based on something ACTUALLY HAPPENING, but there’s still a long of wrongness and injustice going on.

So anyway, we start allowing shrinks to take peoples’ guns away from people even when they are not dangerous to commit to an asylum. What happens then? Now people who insist on exercising their rights are deterred from seeking psychological treatment! Tons of people now must live sick because they are scared of their DOCTOR taking away their constitutional rights. One hundred percent chance that a woman gets raped, traumatized, decides to carry a gun, but is afraid to see counseling because she doesn’t want her gun taken away, because she now knows a gun is the only thing that stands between you and a successful rape. Or someone who lives in a bad neighborhood with lots of burglaries, and can’t afford to move. Maybe they have problems, but now they won’t seek them because it will mean losing their right to self-defense.

Hell, the whole idea of shrinks being able to take away your gun actually seems, to me, to be an idea that would result in MORE death.

Meanwhile, anyone planning to assassinate a public figure is still going to be able to get what they need to do the job. No matter what. Even if you completely ban all guns from all people in America.

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6 Responses to “RANT: No, the Giffords shooting is NOT an excuse to change gun laws and revoke freedom”

For an angering on-topic taking away of your rights sort of thing, look up Florida’s “Baker Act”. They can say you’re a threat to yourself and/or others and take you against your will to a mental hospital, forcing you to stay there for something like 3 days. Of course, it’s being used randomly and indiscriminately, not according to the original intention. Sound familiar? (tasers)

Yup. Two people in particular clamored hard for registration laws, lower capacity magazines, or even for a college admissions paper-pusher to be able to remove your ability to own a gun. (“if jared couldn’t get into college, he shouldn’t ha…ve had a gun”).

Meanwhile, these rules DON’T AFFECT PSYCHOPATHS any more than lowering the speed limit magically stops all car accidents.

Stacy McM: “What’s worse is that it turns out the local sheriff who has been blathering nonstop about how we need more gun laws, had several interactions with the shooter, including on the morning of the shooting. Maybe he can enlighten us as to how having some more laws on the books would have magically enabled his department to know that this particular crazy kid was going to go on a rampage.”